You can't trust the AI hype (opens in new tab)

This is a useful message to the investor audience, but I think the focus on 'hype' is missing the utility of Generative AI and only hovering near the confusion that people express regarding the technology. AI currently is decidedly an extension or tool, it does not have agency. I think this is the main confusion at play. AI cannot displace single workers directly, but it can now be used to great effect to create efficiencies which could in turn displace a percentage of a class of service workers. I think the distinction is important, particularly to those who are concerned that AI may obsolete their jobs.

I have a developing idea that AI can be thought of as "banking" (or sometimes laundering) human labelling. Neural networks don't work at all on things they haven't seen before (out-of-distribution) but can nicely interpolate within what they have seen. Concretely, when chatGPT gives a seemingly clever answer, a data labeller overseas somewhere has already manually given a similar answer to a similar question (similar in the eyes of the model). Depending on the expected distribution of your data, this can work really great for automation. With long tailed data, it either becomes a kind of whack-a-mole or (as with modern LLMs) you just go really big. I haven't seen anything suggesting we're actually able to escape the long tail though, and that in the margins AI NNs will always fail and the only way to improve them is to launder more manpower.

There was an old (2020) a16z article that's still relevant "taming the tail": https://a16z.com/2020/08/12/taming-the-tail-adventures-in-im...